The First Cognitive Revolution, developing as an aspect of the broader
Scientific Revolution, stretches roughly from Galileo
to Kant. In the eyes of many of its participants,
the pivotal issue was whether or not all knowledge is acquired from the
senses--empiricism pitted against rationalism. Since the current tendency
in cultural studies is resolutely empiricist by this admittedly restrictive
definition, and critical practice characterized by the continued tracing
of human capacities and qualities to cultural causes, the early British
Empiricists provide a particularly appropriate starting point for situating
Cognitive Culture Theory, with its rationalist claims about the relevance
of human universals in the understanding of cultural forms.

Innate ideas

Early on in the first cognitive revolution, the debate between rationalists
and empiricists was phrased simply in terms of whether or not knowledge
was acquired from the senses. On the rationalist side, lord Herbert
argued in De Veritate (1645) that certain moral propositions are
innate; on the empiricist side, Locke maintained
the mind is a blank slate at birth (see Locke's arguments
against innate ideas). Locke's position that the understanding is a
set of propositions present to consciousness, however, misses the central
point: what is innate is faculties, not conscious propositional knowledge.

Innate faculties

The commonsense assumption of cognitive transparancy is not challenged
until Hume, whose introspective experiments led
him to posit cognitive faculties with characteristics that cannot be traced
back to experience. This undermined the notion that the understanding is
a product, consisting in propositions; rather, it is a process, where the
power of making inferences (Hume’s celebrated Problem of Induction) requires
an explanation.

It is the search for this explanation that leads Kant
to a formulation of transcendental categories, which represents a partial
resolution to the rationalist/empiricist dichotomy. According to Kant,
empiricism is enabled by faculties that cannot themselves be derived from
experience.

Not until genetic theory is well established is Kant's solution seen
to be compatible with Darwin's theory of evolution, that triumph of practical
empiricism. Lorenz (1977)
points out that what Kant could only place in a transcendental realm, in
the tradition of rationalism, can now be placed in natural history. Pace
Lorenz, however, genes do not directly control behavior; for a discussion
of this early misunderstanding, see The Sociobiological
Fallacy. The relation between innate structures and the environment
remains a highly complex issue that show no signs of going away.

Erasing the boundaries

To pose the empiricist question again, we might put it this way: What
is the evidence that cognitive processing is not wholly dependent on information
acquired from the senses? If it is not from the senses, where is it from?

The proposal of evolutionary psychology is that no sharp line can be
drawn between information that originates in the environment--including
that acquired from the senses--and information that is conveyed through
the genes. This gives us a very different overall picture of cognitive
development.

In the genetic model, the environment is paradoxically all-important.
The information in the genes cannot express itself in bodily structures
unless they are in a complexly specified suitable environment--so much
so that 99% of the information for building an organism may be thought
of as located in the environment and only 1% in the genes themselves (the
proportion is not strictly quantifiable). The environment acts as a trigger
for selective gene transcription, which in turn has an effect upon the
immediate environment. As the information in the gene expresses itself
in response to the structure of the environment, and the environment in
turn responds to the action of the genes, the organism slowly begins to
materialize. It is as if matter itself contains most of the information
for life; it just needs a little extra hint.

In terms of cognitive development, this means that genetic and environmental
information act concurrently to construct cognitive structures. Some of
the environmental information that activates certain genes may come through
the senses; for instance, cats are unable to perceive vertical lines if
they are not exposed to them before a certain age, and children who have
not heard a language before the age of ten will no longer retain the capacity
to acquire one. More complex scenarios with intermediate control structures
are also possible, as an alternative to a continued role for the genes.

While the rationalist argument agrees with the genetic model in that
both affirm that cognition is dependent on structures that do not derive
from experience, the genetic model has historicized rationalism, playing
the part of empiricism in undermining its claims to transcendental universals.
Thus, the distinction between empiricism and rationalism has become largely
meaningless, like two aspects of the same coin that have fused into a sphere.